ACADEMIC The junior English experience
English teacher Melissa Campbell outlines the current practices in the College junior English programmes.
“We pride ourselves on delivering a programme which encourages each boy at his best. In doing so, we are increasingly shifting our focus towards providing greater differentiation in the junior English courses, thus honouring both the diverse young men before us and the New Zealand Curriculum. As the New Zealand Curriculum argues, this means that making the curriculum accessible for all students may require thinking outside the square in daily practice. This requires College staff to be prepared to do things differently,
to work towards a shift from being a “routine expert” to an “adaptive expert” (Timperley, 2011). “English Department planning is moving towards thinking more flexibly about how to organise teaching and learning. For example, a class may all be working in the same learning area and participating in shared learning activities. However, simultaneously, some students may be working with different content, within different curriculum levels, toward different learning outcomes, or in relation to different assessment criteria.
“English students at College are increasingly invited to contribute decisions on these different approaches in the light of the outcomes that are of value to them. One Year 9 class worked collaboratively with their teacher to decide what they wanted to explore in respect to New Zealand and Pasifika short texts. Given the choice, they showed a genuine interest in exploring questions they wanted to investigate. Close reading skills were taught to enable students to make an independent investigation. One student chose to explore the most popular themes in contemporary
Christ’s College Canterbury
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